


The Days That Never Came

by The_Girl_Who_Got_Tired_of_Waiting



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Character Death, Episode: s05e13 The Big Bang, F/M, Feels, Mentions of Mental Illness, Mild Blood, Post Episode: s05e13 The Big Bang, happyish ending, of a sort?, the ponds - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-15
Updated: 2013-09-15
Packaged: 2017-12-26 16:01:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/967879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Girl_Who_Got_Tired_of_Waiting/pseuds/The_Girl_Who_Got_Tired_of_Waiting
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amy called out to the Doctor in the middle of her wedding and brought him back.<br/>Only here's a look at what might have been if it hadn't worked.<br/>'Amy was used to things not making sense in her life. She was used to the feeling of having misplaced something, but not being able to put her finger on what, of missing something she had never had to begin with.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Days That Never Came

Amy was used to things not making sense in her life. She was used to the feeling of having misplaced something, but not being able to put her finger on what, of missing something she had never had to begin with. It was a sense of unease that after years of trying to cut off and ignore she allowed to drape around her, like a second skin. If she couldn’t cure it she would simply ignore it. She could pretend, was very good at it in fact, an actress playing herself, a normal version of herself. 

There was very little to mark her and Rory out as anything other than ‘normal’, or whatever passed for normal these days. An outburst by the bride on their wedding day, a garbled jumble of words that no one could quite recall later, followed by her fainting was easy enough to brush off. Excitement and stress and nerves and finally sheer exhaustion. All perfectly normal feelings for a young woman to experience in the run up to and during the course of her wedding, and she wouldn’t be the first to faint when it all got too much.

As for the words she had shouted and the things that, in that moment, had seemed so important, her therapist assured her that this too was a perfectly common phenomenon. Reverting to childhood delusions and fantasies at times of great upheaval and emotion was something that happened all too often, especially in those who had a history of what could have been either childhood mental illness or a wildly overactive imagination. This was the same therapist Amy still saw once a week. Plenty of people had therapists. It wasn’t that uncommon. Certainly, in these politically correct times, even the stigma of possibly having had delusions and hallucinations as a child was not enough to mark her as unhinged or insane. Not even really enough to mark her as odd. And anyway, she didn’t talk about it much to anyone besides her therapist, and Rory. She didn’t share with anyone the fact that -when endless worried conversations with her parents and desperate looks from her new husband had made it clear that she would need to seek professional help- she spent hours searching through recommendations of therapists to find one that had a speciality for grief counselling. 

That was the closest Amy could get to giving a name to the feeling. Greif without a death, for Amy had never lost anyone. Not anyone real at any rate. A grief so palpable it ached at the same times as it numbed. She thought of herself as an amputee, experiencing pain in a limb that was no longer there to feel anything.

Most of the time Amy could keep it all in check, lock it away inside of herself. Other times it would manifest itself at strange times and demand her attention. It was the two solid hours she spent crying after reaching out a packet of fish fingers from the back of the freezer draw. It was following a man with a funny hat on the train for six stops past hers, and having to call Rory to explain what she was doing in central Wales. It was the bittersweet pang of the familiar in a place or act that Amy had never been or done before. It was the prickles of confusion, of strangeness, in the everyday, the routine.

It was the empty hole inside of her, a shell casing sealed tight but with no trace of the tender inside it had once housed. 

Together, Amy and her counsellor talked through all the possibilities, looking for anything in Amy’s reality that would leave her unfulfilled. Was there anything?

She loved Rory and their life together with all she had left to love with. She just couldn’t shake the sense that there had once been more of her with which to love. 

Children were the most obvious thing missing in their relationship. It was children, Amy’s mother assured her, that made life worth living sometimes. Children were something Rory yearned for, and for the first four years of their marriage, Amy put it off with ever increasing guilt while they saved and got promotions and moved to a proper, family home. 

It wasn’t that Amy didn’t want children. She did want children, Rory’s children more than anything. But she could not shake the ever increasing sense of panic that came with the thought of children in her mind. For a long time she somehow managed to convince herself she was infertile, which was stupid because she was healthy and had never had anything happen to her to flag this up. Not one blood test with odd levels, not one pain passed what every other woman endured monthly. When she did at last settle on trying for a baby, she was still half convinced that it would never actually happen. Her body proved her wrong, and it was less than three months later that she sat in the bathroom clutching a positive touch. Rory was so happy when she told him that he picked her up and swung her round right there in the kitchen, nearly knocking the carefully stacked washing up onto the floor. In that moment they were both so happy that Amy allowed herself to believe that this might, truly, be it. But still there was that hesitation that made her stop Rory from phoning everyone they knew straight away with the news.

“Just give it a couple of weeks.” She said, still smiling to mask the undercurrent of terror that had bolted through her momentarily. “Until we have the first scan, just to make sure?” 

Rory was only a little disappointed. Her next carefully chosen words reassured him.

“It can be our little secret for a couple of weeks.” And she kissed him and felt fuller than she had in years. But still, not quite full all the way. 

Amy wasn’t sure if they fooled anyone over those next weeks. Neither of them could stop smiling and she kept throwing sideways glances at Rory, or touching the back of his hand, just to make sure he was still there, that this too wasn’t a dream that would fade. 

It was the night after that first scan, after they had phoned and told what seemed like the whole of Leadworth and agreed to meet for lunch with both sets of grandparents-to-be for lunch the following day, that the nightmares started. Amy dreamed that her womb was ripped open and the life inside was snatched away. She woke screaming and no amount of comforting from Rory could convince her that everything was fine. She ran to the bathroom and vomited and then ran her hands franticly over her stomach pulling up her nightie and checking. Checking what she didn’t know. Did she really expect to lift her nightie and see that her insides had been gouged and purged, like in her dream? 

She told herself over and over again as she splashed water on her face and straightened her clothes and tried to still her shaking that she was fine. Her baby was fine. She repeated it to Rory he checked her over with a nurse’s eye and a husband’s concern. She was still repeating it as as she got back into bed and he fetched a blanket from the top of the wardrobe to stave off the chill she had suddenly acquired. The next morning, while Rory was in the shower, Amy couldn’t help but check the sheets for blood which, of course, wasn’t there. 

The midwife assured them at their next appointment that, just as Rory had said to her that night, everything was going just fine and that the vomiting which Amy still suffered with was just morning sickness and should taper out during the later months of pregnancy. Nightmares could be attributed to hormones in her body running riot. She stopped telling anyone but Rory about them. She only told him because he was there when she screamed, and sometimes, when she was knelt on the bathroom floor, and she looked up from the toilet, she would catch him standing in the doorway with a look on his face that made her wonder if he shared her nightmares. 

They both agreed not to find out the gender of the baby. They wanted it to be a surprise. But Amy knew, even if she didn’t know how she knew it, that the child growing inside of her was a girl. She knew it before any scan could have told her. When people asked ‘but what do you think you’re having?’ she made a pretence of thinking it over but she already knew. Rory came home one day with a tiny pink sleep suit that he’d bought. 

“I know it might be a boy.” He said, not meeting Amy’s gaze. “But I couldn’t help it. And I’ve just got this feeling that it will be a girl. And if not, we can always keep it for the next one.” 

The next one. Those words made Amy’s heart hammer inside her chest. Part of her wanted to scream because she was so, so sure that there wouldn’t be another one. That she wasn’t even sure there was going to be this one. She was convinced that something would go wrong at every stage. Every time she felt her baby kick it was a small miracle to her. But she swallowed all this down and teased Rory light heartedly and said that if it was a boy they could just be modern and dress him in pink any way. 

She cried in the delivery room as was handed her baby and she let Rory and the midwife think they were tears of happiness and exhaustion. But as she stared into the face of the child she had just given birth to she was wracked with the feeling that this was not right. That this was, in fact, wrong. The wrong birth and the wrong baby that she now held in her arms. 

What started off as irrational unease progressed to suspicion and outright paranoia. She was convinced the nurses had switched her baby, had muddled the paper bracelets each baby in the maternity ward wore. She was adamant that they had taken her baby away and left this changeling stranger in her place. She couldn’t even name her child. The name ‘Melody’ that Rory had suggested so early on in the pregnancy and that had made Amy’s insides flip over as something inside her shouted ‘yes!’ just didn’t fit right with this child. She was not Amy’s Melody. 

It was worse when she left the hospital and had to go home with the still unnamed baby girl. She couldn’t hold her daughter. Couldn’t touch her. Partly it was because she was still so sure that this child was not hers and partly because she was afraid. Every time she reached for infant she was sure her hands would slide right through her, and Amy would be left holding nothing more than vapour. Amy knew the tag of ‘postnatal depression’ that was on the tip of everyone’s tongues. She also knew it wasn’t true. She wasn’t depressed. She was bereaved of a child she had never even had, and now she was scared that she would be bereaved of the one that replaced it too. 

She was going to get away. Go for a week or two to Venice, because she had seen it in brochures and on TV and knew that she had been there once before. She was halfway to the airport in fact when she had her change of heart. It was like a voice inside her head, one that was not her own and not anyone’s that she could place. 

“Come along, Pond.” Said the voice, so clear Amy had to glance around to make sure no one was whispering in her ear. “This isn’t like you.” 

And how would you know? Amy wanted to ask. How should anyone know what she was like when she didn’t even know herself anymore. But as she sat there, in the back of the taxi, she knew that she was wrong and the voice was right. Like so many other things that didn’t make sense in her life, this voice that would be considered a psychotic episode and see her put on medication in an instant if she ever let it slip to her therapist, knew Amy better than she knew herself. 

It knew that she loved Rory, and loved her daughter too. And it knew that she was not going anywhere. Not without them. Together, or not at all. She made the taxi turn round and promised to pay the driver double if he got her home as fast as possible. The hug she shared with Rory when she burst back through the door to their house was enough to make her sway where she stood and also enough to shore her to his side forever. She holds their baby for the first time since the hospital, with shaking hands, and looks into the face that isn’t the one she expected it to be but is still one she knows. Amy’s and Rory’s came together. 

They settle on the name Elizabeth. Elizabeth Williams, no, Elizabeth Pond. A name from a fairy tale that might, like her mother’s, be shortened as she grows. They redecorate, and pain the walls of the nursery pink, and the walls of their own room a shade of blue that Amy picks out because she feels so drawn to it. They hang a print of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in their living room.  
Amy is still scared. She is scared something is gone and she’ll never get it back. She’s scared that Rory will see just how crazy her crazy really is. She doesn’t know that he’s seen it already and is still here. She’s scared every time Elizabeth is out of her sight. But every time she is scared she remembers that voice, that ‘come along Pond’, and she feels like she can do anything. Like she could save the world if she needed to. 

Amy watches her daughter, aged four, playing in the garden, one hand resting on the bump that will soon be Elizabeth’s brother or sister. Elizabeth is chatting and laughing and running around, quite content in her own company. 

“Who’s Elizabeth talking to?” Asks Rory, coming to join his wife in the doorway.

“Just her imaginary friend.” Says Amy, a fond smile on her lips. “She says he’s a doctor.” They both laugh and it is only a small part of Amy that thinks there should be someone else here to witness this. But then, as she sees her daughter playing with her friend, Amy thinks maybe that person was here all along. 

There are things in Amy's life that don’t make sense. But it shall be a long life, and it’s a big universe. And not everything is perfect, nor is everything spoiled. And everything doesn’t always have to make sense.

**Author's Note:**

> So I saw this one post on tumblr. It was a gifset of Amy's scene where she calls back the Doctor with the caption of 'how awkward would it have been if it hadn't worked?' And I laughed. And then I stopped. Seriously though, WHAT IF it hadn't worked?  
> Hence this story was born. I hope you liked it.


End file.
